Keratin fibers, particularly human hair fibers, may be damaged over time. Damages may be caused by environmental factors, including air pollution, sun exposure, chlorine from water pool, and/or rain. Damages may also be caused by applying to the fibers grooming (cosmetic), chemical and/or mechanical treatments. When hair fibers are damaged, the hair fibers may have undesirable conditions of, for example, “fly-away hair”, “split end”, and/or color fade.
Assessing the condition including the degree of damages caused to hair fibers is of interest in order to understand the impact of various environmental factors as well as the impact of the cosmetic (grooming), chemical and mechanical treatments onto keratin fibers. Such assessment is also of interest in order to demonstrate the efficacy of treatments used for preventing and/or repairing hair damages. Several attempts for assessing hair damages, using different analytical methods, have already been reported.
However, these methods usually require many types of equipment and provide data to be interpreted by the skilled person, while being barely understandable for consumers and/or users. Thus, there still remain a need for providing methods to assess fiber conditions such as hair damages, especially such methods which are easy to conduct and/or easy to understand.
There may further exists a need for such method which allows a direct visualization of the degree of fiber condition such as hair damages